Posts Tagged ‘The Dust Bowl’

Long before Hurricane Sandy (capital letters), there was hurricane sandy.

In light of the recent devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, the new Ken Burns documentary The Dust Bowl has even greater relevance.

Hurricane Sandy, of course, crushed parts of New York City, and has led to increased debate about whether man-made global warming is causing weather patterns to become more volatile and deadly.

With The Dust Bowl, however, there is no debate. It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history – to this point.

The Dust Bowl, which airs in two parts, Sunday, Nov. 18 and Monday, Nov. 19 on most PBS affiliates, chronicles the horrific and unique weather situation in the central United States in the 1930s (with the impact blowing north all the way to Canada and east all the way to the Atlantic coast). The weather conditions dove-tailed with the economic depression to create a giant storm of misery for both humans and animals.

A frenzied wheat boom had encouraged what became known as “the great plow-up,” with farmers in the Southern Plains feverishly plowing up hundreds and hundreds of miles of resilient “buffalo grass” that had been perfectly adapted for the area through centuries.

But when drought came, as it always does in a cyclical sense, there was an unprecedented effect: Black walls of dirt and dust in the air, damaging or even killing everything in their path.

“Conventional wisdom and shorthand history seem to always relegate the story of the Dust Bowl to just a handful of storms and an inevitable connection to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,” said Burns, whose previous outstanding documentary series include Prohibition, Jazz, Baseball and The Civil War.

“We quickly discovered, however, a much more complex, tragic and interesting story that continues to resonate today. This is a cautionary tale rather than (an) inspirational story. But it still is a story of our complex and often fraught relationship with the land.”

The Dust Bowl features interviews with 26 survivors of those hard times, combined with stunning photographs and seldom-seen movie footage.

“More than any other film we have made, (this) is an oral history populated less by historians and experts than those who survived those horrible days,” Burns said. “They are at the end of their own lives now, but they were children and teenagers then, their searing memories as raw and direct as if this had all happened yesterday.

“What they were witnessing is unparalleled in American history, and yet their perspective is resolutely personal and intimate. Through a child’s eyes, they watched as their parents’ world collapsed, watched as their farms were lost and their own siblings died of the merciless dust pneumonia.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president, desperately tried to find a way to save the region, an area once called No Man’s Land that includes devastated counties in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and parts of southeastern Colorado, northwestern Kansas and northeastern New Mexico. He was able to swipe his finger on his desk in the White House and come up with Oklahoma.”

SOUNDS OF SILENCE: Geez, the old guy on the panel for The Dust Bowl was more happy about being here than entertainment mogul David Geffen was. Geffen (pictured above) doesn’t give many interviews, and he didn’t really give one this time, either. A lot of one-sentence answers. He wasn’t rude, he just seemed genuinely disinterested in the subject matter, even though the subject matter was, well, himself. The doc is titled Inventing David Geffen, and for most of the session that’s was reporters tried to do. The thing is, when Geffen did engage, he had some interesting things to say. My fave: “The biggest movies today have no stars in them.” So true, but I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

A REAL DUST-UP: Ken Burns sessions always are among my favourites at TCA. I’m usually smarter at the end of them, you know? (Understandably I’ve left a lot of room for growth in that regard.) Fascinating to understand that The Dust Bowl – a series of horrible dust storms that ravaged the central United States in the 1930s – was a man-made calamity, caused by the reckless plowing-up of thousands of miles of beautiful grasslands that has existed for eons. Once a drought hit (cyclical and inevitable), all that dirt was exposed, just waiting to be blown around, creating apocalyptic storms.

CLORIS THE CLOWN: Cloris Leachman has a schtick at TCA. She hijacks and disrupts sessions. That’s her thing. But during the Pioneers of Television panel, she actually seemed to grow bored by her own antics after a while, and just settled down.

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Bill has been a Sun columnist, reporter and editor for 22 years. Previously was in Sports as Toronto Raptors beat writer and NBA columnist, he joined Entertainment in 2005 as a television and music critic before moving exclusively to TV. Prior to the Sun, he worked at the Montreal Daily News, the Orillia Packet & Times and the Sherbrooke Record.